Soaring temperatures may bring rising seas, disrupted agriculture, vast migrations, and the inundation of coastal cities around the world—and there are a lot of coastal cities around the world. Still, I live three hundred metres above sea level in a region that may well benefit from global warming (the risks of invasion, famine, war, mass extinction, and the complete collapse of civilization aside). What would really throw wooden shoes into Canada’s proverbial gears is cooling. Only a mere 12,000 years ago, the place where I live was just emerging from an ice sheet a mile thick. You may think Canadians hate shovelling snow now… wait until there’s nearly two kilometres of the stuff. Straight up.
So, if we wanted to cool down the Earth, how would we go about it? One way is to screw with the atmosphere (or distribution of the continents) so that either less light reaches the ground or proportionately more heat escapes out into space. The real world offers some fairly dramatic examples of what’s achievable here: the Azolla Event, for example, may have drawn down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 80%, transforming the world from a tropical greenhouse into its current icebox state. Our ancestors had it easy: the Great Unconformity (in which a considerable amount of crustal material is apparently missing) has been explained as the side effect of the glaciers of “snowball Earth” scraping or eroding away a staggering amount of material.
A number of SF authors have imagined scenarios in which the earth cools down dramatically. Here are five that I liked1 …
Precisely what happened to the climate in Poul Anderson’s The Winter of the World is unclear; it’s set far enough in the future that Mars is green (presumably a hat tip to now outmoded models of Martian climate), so it’s possible that Earth is simply the victim of natural processes. Still, references in the novel suggest that the first phase of the cooling that ended our civilization involved a large number of extreme heating events provided courtesy of our pal, the nuclear bomb. (Presumably using them made sense at the time?) Millennia later, humanity is well on its way towards recovering what was lost under the ice—not least of all, epic imperialism. While the political machinations are familiar from history, time and isolation have given rise to something entirely novel in the far north.
The cause of the cooling in John Christopher’s The World in Winter (The Long Winter in the US) is quite straightforward: the Sun dims ever so slightly. Hard cheese for the people of Great Britain, which as we know has had its indigenous human population wiped out by encroaching glaciers a half dozen or so times in the last million years2. A bunch of privileged Brits head for Africa, which is less affected by the cooling. Much to the consternation of the refugees, they find that African nations only recently freed from their colonial conquerors do not welcome them with open arms…much like the real-world reactions of wealthy nations shutting out victims of climate change, war, and social disruption.
There’s nothing wrong with the Sun in Housuke Nojiri’s Usurper of the Sun. The problem begins with Mercury, which alien mechanisms are busy converting into a ring around the Sun. Why the aliens think this is a good idea isn’t immediately clear. What is clear is that the ring material blocks enough of the sunlight to cause abrupt global cooling on Earth. The episodic novel focuses on attempts to mitigate the effect of the Ring and better understand the enigmatic beings who created it.
Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud is in no sense enigmatic. As soon as the entity becomes aware that Earth is inhabited by intelligent beings, it’s happy to communicate with them. Unfortunately for a considerable fraction of the human race, the Cloud only belatedly notices humanity—that is, after the vast alien (large enough to eclipse the Sun while feeding) has wreaked havoc on the planet’s climate. Its attempts to befriend us have…mixed results.
Fritz Leiber embraces the old saying “No sun, no problem!” Runaway warming has been vanquished forever thanks to the timely intervention of a passing dark star that flicked Earth out into deepest space. Many stories focus on the immediate efforts to survive. “A Pail of Air” touches on the question of why, given the circumstances, humanity should even try to survive.
“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer.”
[…]
“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel—or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worthwhile. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”
[…] “So right then and there,” Pa went on, […] “I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”
And really, isn’t that the way we should deal with all setbacks? Do what we can to survive, while keeping our sensawunda?
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nomineeJames Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]For certain values of liked. Not the best books ever, but OK. Note: a lot of you may be expecting Fallen Angels (by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn) to be mentioned and may be surprised that it isn’t. Why? It’s a terrible book.
[2]Contemporary Great Britain is in the enviable position that the current climate is a nearly ideal compromise between grinding everything under glaciers or having a large fraction of it submerged beneath the rising seas. The downside is that pretty much any major alternation in climate will not be to their advantage.
A PAIL OF AIR is one of my favorites, and I am pleased to see love for Poul Anderson’s Winter of the World as well
Gregory Manchess’ ABOVE THE TIMBERLINE shows a civilization seeking to discover the wonders of an earlier age buried by a severe global cooling.
How about Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner?
Ring-Rise Ring-set by Monica Hughes. It’s been a few decades since I read it so my memory is hazy, but I seem to remember the idea of ‘black snow’ to reverse the cooling.
The first book of this type I remember reading was Robert Silverberg’s “Time of the Great Freeze,” a YA which came out in 1964. I wondering if this was the first YA SF novel to treat this subject.
I read A PAIL OF AIR when I was a teen and it stuck with me only as a concept. It took the arrival of Internet search engines for me to finally rediscover it. Great story. Also, I used to have that same paperback edition of THE BLACK CLOUD. I haven’t reread that one in years. Time to dig it up, I think.
Re: footnote 1: Thank you.
A Pail of Air is one of those stories that despite its extreme scientific silliness (which only begins with the idea of blankets keeping out hard vacuum), still sticks with you and James’ quotes are part of why.
Don’t forget Fallen Angels
Fallen Angels may be a bad book in toto, but it’s got some good scenes that have stuck with me for years.
“When the going gets weird, the weird get going” runs into “Okay, but where do we go?”
People who are determined to preserve their identity and way of life even though it’s going to destroy their children’s future
Green idealists encounter the corruptions and seductions of power, and coattail-riders who have long since succumbed learn how to talk green
The unholy alliance between the woo purveyors and the know-nothing Old Paths fanatics, as if the target population for MLM schemes had gotten itself elected en masse
For cooling of globes other than Earth, the Tran stories by Alan Dean Foster are fun.
I was going to list off some cooling alien worlds and then I realized I have at least an essay about those in me. Maybe two, because there are global warming novels that make our flirtation with End Permian II: Therapsids Get Boned Again look like spring warming.
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing is about a fairly sudden ice age on a planet that isn’t Earth.
Am I the only one who consistently misspells therapsids as therapists?
Zero for five again. Four of these books are fifty years old ???
There are several other excellent books that talk abut global cooling:
1. _The Last Centurion_ by John Ringo
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Centurion-John-Ringo-ebook/dp/B00APA1HKC/
2. _Fallen Angels_ by Pournelle, et al
https://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven-ebook/dp/B005BJTZ1U/
3. _All These Worlds_ by Dennis Taylor (maybe the previous book in the series also)
https://www.amazon.com/All-These-Worlds-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/dp/B0736185ZL/
There is at least one more that I am thinking of.
Iain M Banks “Feersum Endjinn” is about a struggle to avert global cooling (caused by an encroaching interstellar dust cloud) but the cooling doesn’t really get under way.
Arthur C Clarke had a short story about the last man in London, trying to stay alive as the weather gets colder; the story ends with his realisation that the white line on the horizon is the returning glaciers. Can’t remember the name, though.
The Time Machine has some disturbing glimpses of a cooling earth as the sun dies.
It’s been so long since I read the Banks I recall nothing of it aside from the dialect.
I don’t know that there’s an essay in the local interstellar medium but like most people I think it’s fascinating to know we’ve spent a fair amount of time traversing a vast, hot and thin region in the ISM astronomers imaginatively call the Local Bubble. It happens we’re either just beginning to enter or will soon enter a dense region astronomers imaginatively call the Local Fluff. Can’t recall speculations the Fluff will cool us off (don’t think it is dense enough to block significant amounts of light) but it may push the heliopause down below 1 AU, which would increase the amount of cosmic radiation reaching us. In a better world, we would all become super powered mutants but in this one, all we can expect is a slight bump in cancer rates.
There is a reason why the better cooling novels tend to be older, imo: to write a cooling novel now generally goes hand in hand with authorial tendencies I find exquisitely tedious. Of course, it’s easy enough to come up with five ways [1] to plausibly cool the Earth to the point an ice age kicks in but both of those novels are more about vilifying various groups than plausible climate science.
1: Can I come up with five handwaves that haven’t been used?
A: A large Kuiper Belt object migrates into the inner system. It never hits the Earth but the dust released blocks enough sunlight to trigger an ice age.
B: Space industrialization takes off the way we were promised. Cunning machines transform the belt into useful products. An unintended side effect is that the Poynting–Robertson effect sends all the dust down past 1 AU, where it cools us off to set off an ice age.
C : Eager to facilitate Pacific-Atlantic trade, investors revive the old plan to use thermonuclear devices to carve out a larger trans-Central American canal very, very quickly. Mistakes are made; by the time the temporary cooling from the Big Stick explosion settles, the new, large channel between Pacific and Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream.
D: As in A but with an orbital relationship to the Earth that lets it alter Earth’s obliquity to, oh, sixty degrees. By the time civilization recovers (this time by a collection of bright raccoons only vaguely aware the relics they find are of another species) the ice is marching towards the equator
E: Alarmed that WWIV could be even worse than WWIII, brilliant scientists devise a way to suppress weak nuclear forces in a large volume. No fission triggers, no nukes as we know them. It’s true shutting down beta decay in the sun will have interesting long term effects but better than than thermonuclear doom now.
(the week after the weak force suppressor is revealed, someone realizes the same science facilitates pocket catalysed proton decay because that is how stories like this work)
You may not consider it good, and it’s definitely not printed text, but the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) ends with an Earth clearly in another ice age.
Isn’t AI based on a Brian Aldiss work whose details I have forgotten even more thoroughly than the movie?
Usurper of the Sun has a hilarious note from the author:
He’s talking about delta-vees in the tens of kilometers per second. But he knows too much about rocket science to use the usual high acceleration, high delta-vee rockets.
Counting the lady’s cleavage on “A Pail of Air”, three of these covers have females not dressed for a chilly snap (maybe they’re from brave Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Mainly it’s the mini-dress on “The Winter of the World” that struck me. Both men and women also should wear a hat, I do, but, as I say, my first thought was for the mjni-dress.
@20: “Supertoys Last All Summer Long.” The movie expands on the short story’s plot and setting and adds massive global climate change.
I think it’s a good meditation on a question that had already been bothering me for some time, because of Star Wars: If we do create true artificial intelligence…what will we do to it? I didn’t like what happened to a certain human character at the end of the movie until I realized that it was an ironic mirroring of how A.I.s had been treated all along: as consumable goods and also as temporary fixes for vast and deep problems.
22: Canadian schools in the 1960s were diligent about forcing the girls to wear skirts in winter despite trousers being warmer.
The UK kind of balanced this by putting boys in shorts. My British clothes were ill suited for my first Canadian winter.
James @@@@@ 16:
I think the current consensus is that we’re already inside the Local Fluff. The density of the solar wind at 1 AU is around 5 atoms/ions per cubic centimeter; this is orders of magnitude too low to have any effect on transmission of sunlight, and the Local Fluff is actually about an order of magnitude more tenuous than that (only 0.3 atoms/ions per cubic centimeter). The Sun’s wind and the accompanying magnetic field are doing a fine job of keeping the heliopause out where it currently is.
I think Gardner Dozois wrote a story involving a new ice age, but I can’t recall the title at the moment.
Edited to Add: I was thinking of “Glacier” by Kim Stanley Robinson (first published in Asimov’s when Dozois was editor).
@13 JDN – No, apparently The Graudian is on record as having done so as well.
Forgot – I must second wlewisiii @6’s thanks for your foregoing of the execrable Fallen Angels.
@18 – Another couple of more contemporary SF novels in which global cooling is not a stick to beat greenies etc. with:
Alistair Reynolds’ Century Rain features an Earth with an average surface temperature of below freezing, and expeditions to its surface from the surviving orbital culture must be careful, apparently, not to bring back some sort of infectious agent with them. Reynolds never says so, but it’s apparent that some distributed geo-engineering agent, probably nanotech in nature and intended to scavenge excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, got out of control, sucked it all out and now can’t be switched off.
Allen Steele’s Chronospace (IIRC) featured a future glacial Earth – the Moon had been blasted into fragments by aliens, and the resultant ring intercepted enough of the Sun’s radiance to cool the Earth’s surface sufficiently that the biosphere, let alone industrial civilization, was having a hard time keeping going. This is the only instance I can recall of anyone considering a ring around a planet with a biosphere as anything but a decoration.
Could we forestall runaway greenhouse due to the sun’s increasing brightness by deliberately engineering much higher albedos due to ice or chroming the equator?
The novel isn’t about global cooling, but in the epilogue to Arthur Clarke’s “Fountains of Paradise” an envoy from an alien species visits Earth during a snowball Earth caused by a severe temporary downturn in the Sun’s luminosity (humans have become technologically advanced enough that this is only a minor inconvenience to them).
Stephen Baxter’s The Timeships has a snowball Earth occurring after human civilization is restarted in the deep past, apparently due to poorly planned geoengineering.
Another way to get global cooling:
Nanotech works. Not enough to gragu the world, but enough to supply all material needs, wants and whims. Want a mansion, a palace? It’s ready to move in to as fast as the assemblers can convert carbon dioxide in the air to diamond bricks and other useful construction supplies.
Atmospheric CO2 drops from 400 PPM to 1 PPM. And things get cold.
Why don’t we just release some of the carbon back into the air for a more equable climate? Because people are stupid.
(More specifically: due to tendency of morality to freeze by age 25, and now that everybody is immortal due to nanotech, codgers are the primary lifeforms on Earth. The original liberals still know in their hearts that releasing CO2 is bad and status within their peer group is determined by your time-integrated carbon footprint. The original conservatives know in their hearts that humans have no effect on climate, and anyway giving up wealth in the form of carbon stores is an evil form of taxation: especially now that it takes 400 times as long for assemblers to build anything.)
32: How much carbon is locked up in the codgers themselves? Asking for a friend.
On the matter of British school attire in cold weather, I certainly wore short trousers throughout the winter of 1963, reckoned to be one of the worst on record. There apparently exists a picture of me and my two sisters playing in the snow, me in short trousers and they in skirts.
We discovered to our delight that the pipes on our building were external and thus fully exposed to said winter of 1963.
Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Shifting Seas”, published posthumously in 1937, works out the implications of a really big volcanic event breaking open the Isthmus of Panama and stopping the Gulf Stream. As one of the characters points out, London is at the latitude of Labrador, and hundreds of millions of Europeans will be looking for warm places to move to. ( The full text is available online.)
Of the novels written at the height of the “global cooling“ scare of the 1970s, Wilson Tucker’s Ice and Iron (1974), with glaciers once again grinding their way south from Canada, has stuck in my mind.
Susan Beth Pfeffer’s YA series, “Life As We Know It,” has a global cooling after an asteroid knocks the moon into a different orbit– tectonic shifts, earthquakes, all the volcanoes erupting, decades-long ash clouds, everything gets really cold.
And although it’s neither science-fiction nor truly global, Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders follows the rise, decline, and fall of the Norse settlers in Greenland, as the Little Ice Age cools off the only world they know.
#37 – If I recall rightly, Poul Anderson wrote a short story or novelette about Greenland settlers being driven off by encroaching ice. No ships have come for years, and they are trapped by a native curse that brings sea monsters to attack the little skin boats they can manage to build.
#18 And there’s an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, as employed by Pratchett and Baxter in The Long Earth.
The Snow by Adam Roberts imagines an Earth completely covered by, well, snow. The novel starts as a regular -and quite good- catastrophe novel but then diverges into weird metafictional territory. It’s an interesting book, though not as accomplished as some later novels by the same author.
@37,
Thanks. I remembered the books, but not the author/title.
Has NO ONE mentioned Book of the New Sun!?!?!?!?!?!
Shame.
My big memory of the freeze of 1963 was of my mother still putting washing on an outdoor drying line. My brother was still in nappies at the time (diapers, for Americans) and they were washable cloth ones. When my mother brought them in, they were as stiff as a board and she could stand them up in front to the fire to thaw them.
Our flat in Herne Hill had a giant fire place which we were not allowed to us. Later on, when we’d gone back to Canada (because the air pollution was literally killing me), leaving my dad behind to finish his PhD at Imperial, his roommate found out why: the fire place was not in fact fire proof….
Ah, so you were down in the warm south. We were up in County Durham. But we did have a working fire place. And paraffin heaters, which gave off an odd smell.
What about Colleen McCullough’s A Creed for the Third Millenium?
It’s been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall that there was another ice age, and the main character was manipulated by the government to be a leader/healer for the morale of the common people in the face of their hardships.
How about the movies, Sunshine and The Day After Tomorrow?
I guess the latter fails the “OK” criteria, but how about the former? (I think it’s A-Okay.)
Call the Midwife recently got to the winter of 1963. It was quite something.
I have a couple of memories of the winter of 63, one being washed in the belfast sink in the kitchen and sitting on the wooden draining board – I was maybe two and a half. The other was watching the back door being opened and the snow that had drifted up against it was taller than me, it shaded up from grey to white to a sparkling of rainbows as the crystals at the top caught the sun. That was in Oxford which didn’t usually get much if any snow being in the soft south.
Global chilling was an important part of The Postman by Brin.
There’s a book I read circa 2009-10, but I didn’t note down title or author. It’s a YA book, written as a teenage girl’s diary; the sequel follows a boy in the big city but isn’t a diary. The Moon moves closer to Earth (asteroid hit?) and messes up the environment. Cool, then very strong winter, results, with food shortages, mostly-complete breakdown in civilization, and so on. The family is mother and three kids – college age boy, high school girl (the diarist), and younger boy who is/was an aspiring baseball player; they’re very close to their elderly female neighbor. There’s a doctor who wants to court the mother who – as with most of the local medical staff – are more-or-less hostages in the hospital because hospital access becomes controlled by thugs. I noticed that society didn’t totally break down although circumstances indicated it should have – for example, teenage thug/scavengers didn’t ransack the neighbor’s house till after she died.
By recently on Call the Midwife, you mean a year ago? Or is this in the US. According to Wikipedia – I don’t watch it myself – that was the Christmas 2017 special and apparently Jenny Agutter wrote her reminiscences of the winter to coincide with the programme. She is slightly older than me and would have just turned 10 when the freeze started.
To put things in perspective, according to Wikipedia, the lowest temperature recorded was -19.4C in Scotland. I don’t know how cold it got where I was in County Durham or in London. Only the upper parts of the Thames froze and someone apparently drove a car across it in Oxford. In the UK, the east of the country in winter tends to be colder than the west, as the Atlantic has a warming effect.
By comparison, I see the BBC is saying that temperatures as low -53C are being predicted for the US, and that will be further south than anywhere in the UK.
My big memory of the freeze of 1963 was of my mother still putting washing on an outdoor drying line. My brother was still in nappies at the time (diapers, for Americans) and they were washable cloth ones. When my mother brought them in, they were as stiff as a board and she could stand them up in front to the fire to thaw them.
This happens pretty much every winter in Scotland if you use an outdoor line.
@51/Paul Dormer: Not yet understanding the climate affects of the Gulf Stream (see @36, above), the British tended to establish their American colonies farther to the north than they should have.
As a result, when it came time for the American Revolution, the horrible winter weather, to which the colonists were inured, proved to be a “secret weapon” against troops coming from Europe. It’s no accident that George Washington’s first major victory, the Battle of Trenton, took place on December 26, 1776. The Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton, New Jersey were taken completely by surprise by so unseasonable an attack, and most were captured after a brief but fierce engagement.
The overnight low here last night was -25. The books are coming true! :O
Not yet understanding the climate affects of the Gulf Stream (see @36, above), the British tended to establish their American colonies farther to the north than they should have.
The British colonies in America were not established where they were because the British assumed “oh, this is the right latitude therefore it must be good weather here, let’s just ignore the actual weather and build a colony”. I think you made that up.
@55/ajay: Your comment may just be dry humor at the expense of the colonialists, but …
“Received wisdom was that climates were more or less the same everywhere along the same latitudes. … Similar rationalizations led Spaniards to look for Mediterranean conditions and a ‘new Andalusia’ in Georgia and the Carolinas, and inspired English visions of silk, spices, and sugar in Virginia and even New England.”
https://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/new-worlds-of-climate-change-the-little-ice-age-and-the-colonization-of-north-america
Snowpiercer!
Aldis – Helliconia Winter
Roger Zelazny’s “The Keys to December” has always been my favorite. It’s a short story about children born with genetic modifications to work in a frozen mining world which subsequently explodes. All the children grow up in isolated freezers unable to see each other or their families until a plan emerges to make a homeworld cold enough for them to live on.
It can be easily found in full by googling the title, it’s an incredible read!
@56 – wasn’t that how a bunch of the Scandinavians were lured over to the upper US midwest? “The same lattitude as northern Italy….”
It has been a while (for values of a while ~= 25 years) since I read “The Long Winter”, but I remember being amused by the amount of print-space devoted to the characters obsessing about whether or not their preferred types of liquor(s) were going to be available.
My takeaway was that John Christopher was a more-than-casual drinker.
I also remember thinking that it was a pretty terrible book.
@56, given that the explorers and colonists knew nothing about the Gulf Stream or other things that effect climate we can’t really blame them for assuming latitude = climate since that was their experience. They used to think there was a giant continent in the southern hemisphere to balance Eurasia too. Turns out God is less interested in symmetry than eighteenth c. geographers where.
The best one in my regard is Fallen Angels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This story is based on actual science and involves a not so distant future in which a green anti-science political party has seized power in the USA and outlawed most technology. Because global warming was the only thing keeping us from another ice age, most of the northern hemisphere is covered by ice and snow. The international space station crews are trapped in space and only stay alive through airponics and scooping air periodically from the atmosphere. It’s on one of these missions that a crew of astronauts is shot down by the American Science Police and upon crash landing, must evade authorities and find a way back to orbit.
Someone asked how we humans could deliberately cool the planet. Simplest method is not to do anything to Earth at all, but instead park an asteroid at the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point in a direct line between the Earth and the Sun. Then spin the asteroid, which should separate it into a cloud of dust and debris. Result: “Quick” and dirty Solar parasol. Such a scheme could reduce solar input received on Earth by a significant percentage; 2% would be all that is required to reduce all currently predicted effects of climate change long term. As the Earth-Sun L1 site isn’t actually stable, the dust cloud would eventually dissipate, especially as simple radiation pressure (light, solar wind, etc.) would also act upon it. We could speed this up if necessary, or deposit new asteroids if needed.
All this is effectively possible right now, by the way, with our current level of technology. We already know that a simple space probe can act as a “gravity carrot” to alter asteroid orbits. The rest is just applied engineering.
In the meantime, Earth gets a pass on CO2 concerns, while effort increases to replace fossil fuel technology with more efficient nuclear power and even fusion (which is closer than most people probably think).
How about Twilight of Briareus by Richard Cowper? A nice cosy British tale of disaster and possible alien invasion as the Earth cools rapidly following the eruption of a supernova nearby. Not read it in years but remember descriptions of snow-bound Oxford and the abandonment of the UK, north of the Wash!
Another vote here for “Fallen Angels” by Niven etal. I understand why you may not have liked it but it does deal with consequences of our society ignoring technology and actively being anti-science. What I did enjoy was the amount of “Tuckerisation” that went into a book about a group of fen helping spacemen :) In one of Niven’s later books, he wrote an essay explaining how they offered the chance for a number of Fans to be immortalised.
Candle in a Cosmic Wind, novella by Joseph Manzione.
Absolutely the single most moving piece of sci-fi I have ever read.
Preview it: https://books.google.com/books?id=f4Pkb3slE80C&lpg=PA379&ots=99BXIa8KHI&pg=PA379#v=onepage&f=false
Find it: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?49337
Another vote here for Niven & Pournelle’s “Fallen Angels”, which gets mixed receptions, here & elsewhere. But N&P’s hypothesis, that AGW might be keeping the glaciers at bay, has stood the test of time, and is now (I think) a respectable hypothesis. I’m continually amused at the constant bleatings about a degree or too of human-caused warming. The climate has generally been warming since the end of the last Ice Age. As you know, James. The real horror-show would be if the glaciers return. Which they will, someday. Maybe sooner if the “Decarbonization” enthusiasts get their way!
Granted, it’s no literary masterwork, and I’ve only read it once, many years ago. But still.
[citation needed]
N&P’s hypothesis, that AGW might be keeping the glaciers at bay, has stood the test of time, and is now (I think) a respectable hypothesis.
No, it’s not. The primary driver of glacial and interglacial periods are the Milankovitch Cycles. These can be accurately calculated hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and there is general agreement that — ignoring anthropogenic CO2 effects — the next glaciation probably isn’t due for another 50,000 years or so. (Anthropogenic CO2 may well postpone that glaciation by 50,000 years or more, but that’s only useful for people living 50,000 years in the future.)
@71/PeterErwin: As I recall, the Scientific American article argued, not that global warming is holding back the glaciers, but that the climate should have gradually turned to cooling several thousand years ago, absent the human habit of burning things, especially in primitive agriculture. The article was published at least several years ago, so it may have been overtaken by later findings.
As for Fallen Angels, it’s not much of a criticism to say that the science now looks shaky or obsolete, in a book almost 30 years old.
Leaving aside the drinking-your-bathwater injoke aspects of Fallen Angels as well as the enormous chip on its shoulder, there’s *still* things about it that irritate me. In particular, it’s *completely blind* to the idea that there’s more to the world than a small pocket of Southern Californian politics. You think Canada’s just going to accept being buried under a mile of ice and happily move south? You think *Russia* is gonna just let Moscow get ploughed over because of some yips who’ve never seen snow? Iceland? Great Britain? Come on.
Niven and Pournelle aren’t bad writers on the main, and when Fallen Angels can get out of its own way there are some interesting bits, but it is *absolutely* a product of where two of the three writers lived. I dunno much about Flynn.
@73/foamy: Perhaps Fallen Angels is best understood as a product of its time, as an answer to equally far-fetched global warming scenarios currently being published ca. 1990. I know Stephen Jay Gould was very critical of some of those (nonfiction) books for engaging in hyperbole.
I haven’t read FA in a very long time, but my impression is, the authors considered it a jape, almost fan fiction. I think it’s safe to say no one would class it with their best work.
East-coaster Michael F. Flynn is probably the best writer of the three. His novella, “Memories of the Heart” is not to be missed. And The Wreck of The River of Stars is one of the best hard SF novels ever written.
The concerns about the U.S. government making private modems illegal is certainly a very 1990 thing, to be sure, and I’m also old enough to remember Waterworld (et al), but the book is absolutely just tilting windmills whilst mounted on hobbyhorses mixed in with incestuous con-fan references and jokes.
I liked the orbital death ray, though.
Since I don’t tend to read fiction — even “hard” science-fiction for the science, I don’t particularly care that Fallen Angels got climate science quite so wrong. It was a fun, one-shot read.
Better based on science at the time it was written is Pohl’s “Fermi and Frost.” (https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791078/9781625791078___3.htm), although the TTAPS article that inspired it was somewhat pessimistic in the assumptions presented.
@76/swampyankee — If it’s the story I’m thinking of, “Fermi and Frost” deserves credit for eschewing On the Beach-style human extinction propaganda.
There’s a fascinating and very lengthy article about the controversy over the TTAPS nuclear winter predictions at:
https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/88spp.html
The bottom line is that, not surprisingly, the five scientists were eager to deter a nuclear war.
Sagan didn’t help his case when his prediction, that oil well fires during the Kuwait War would lower temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, proved spectacularly wrong.
foamy @@@@@ 73:
I’d be inclined to think American-centric parochialism is a general American tendency, not just some peculiarity of California.
As for Michael Flynn — he’s pretty right-wing, and definitely a global-warming denialist. He’s from Pennsylvania, for whatever that’s worth.
taras @@@@@ 72:
As I recall, the Scientific American article argued, not that global warming is holding back the glaciers, but that the climate should have gradually turned to cooling several thousand years ago …
Which of the many thousands of articles (none of which, mind you, are original research articles) would that be? And how is that relevant to PeteTillman’s reference to “N&P’s hypothesis, that AGW might be keeping the glaciers at bay”?
@78: It *specifically* all the bugbears and communities of Southern California writ large across the U.S., and then the rest of the world treated as a cursory afterthought. So, you know, it’s both.
I am personally particularly offended by the cavalier way in which Canada is disposed of, being Canadian. It’s a common thing in American fiction in one way or another and it never ceases to be less annoying. I would expect our complete annihilation as a nation to have, you know, some repercussions.
But nope.
*never ceases to be annoying. I shouldn’t write at 5am.
@78-81: I’ve watched a good bit of anime, over the years. I’m not one bit surprised or put out when the stories — alien invasions, supernatural eruptions — mostly take place in Japan.
Of all places on Earth, H.G. Wells’ Martians choose to attack England: of course they do!
Peter: My impression (I’ve had lunch with him a couple of times at cons) is that Michael Flynn is an old-style JFK Democrat — like poor old Bill “the age of big government is over“ Clinton, left behind as his party moved on. The term “denialist” usually indicates the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle, a common ploy in political polemics: “If you don’t believe A, then you must believe Z, and there are no other alternatives.”
Obviously, the notion attributed to Niven and Pournelle (and Flynn), that AGW is holding back the glaciers, is an exaggeration of the hypothesis that human activity may have reversed a cooling trend in the climate. What am I missing?
foamy: (Is that a Buffy reference? That episode was hilarious, though a lot of people didn’t get it.) I think most Americans are vaguely aware of the existence of Canada. It’s where bad weather comes from.
Note to self: Five Absurd Visions of Canada from SF would have at least one reader…
@82: I don’t object to a story written by Americans being set primarily in America, although I think given we’re talking about SF, a genre where people regularly create alien societies (actual aliens not required), it represents something of a failure of imagination to write about your local neighbourhood. Fallen Angels would’ve been a much better book if the band of fandom reprobates on their road trip had included, say, a *Canadian* SF fan, which shouldn’t have been much of a reach for somebody who can invent a two-headed tri-sexed herbivore OCD civilization, but I guess was. Then again, a Canadian might’ve had bigger priorities than attending a WorldCon, such as *the hundreds of feet of ice that have apparently buried Toronto* (but not Detroit?) and exacting revenge on the apparent Fisher King of the setting, the San Francisco City Council.
Gragh.
@83: Dang straight I’d be interested, but I have a suspicion you’d need to do some work to avoid five versions of the bland old chestnut, ‘the U.S. and Canada form a North American Federation/Association/etc, nothing changes in the U.S., which is the only part we see in the story’.
At least Fallout made the U.S. have to fight a war for the annexation.
taras @@@@@ 82L
Obviously, the notion attributed to Niven and Pournelle (and Flynn), that AGW is holding back the glaciers, is an exaggeration of the hypothesis that human activity may have reversed a cooling trend in the climate. What am I missing?
The fact that this isn’t something “attributed to” Niven & Pournelle & Flynn, it’s straight-up the premise of their book. Here, let me quote from Michael Flynn’s blog:
(The rest of his post is a bit of a gallimaufry of climate-change denialist BS: everyone ignores the Little Ice Age, it’s really the Sun, it’s cosmic rays, temperatures have stopped increasing, etc.)
And, again, I have to ask: what is this “Scientific American article” you were referring to?
84: I am thinking more of novels where French Canada bullies the rest of North America despite being outnumbered 40-1, or products where the Canadian cash in the cover art is clearly Canadian Tire money or whatever that book was were the author thought Quebec was Vichy in WWII.
@86: That’s be amazing! I really hope you do do that series.
I seem to recall an oldie that involved the U.S. invading Canada for our oil that ended on the governor general surrendering, dating from the late-70s-early-80s, but I don’t have the title to hand.
Almost certainly Richard Rohmer’s Ultimatum, in which perfidious America appears to defeat us, followed by Exxoneration, in which we teach them what’s what. And then the plot keeps going, for some reason. Author is Canadian but the books are nigh unreadable.
Sounds right! Thanks for the pointer. Looks like I was off on the date.
@86-89: Audiences drank deeply of Canadian culture in the sci-fi movie, Strange Brew.
The kidnapping of the Princess of Canada by Tooth Decay was also memorable.
@85/PeterErwin — Thou asketh and thou receiveth:
“How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate? A bold new hypothesis suggests that our ancestors’ farming practices kicked off global warming thousands of years before we started burning coal and driving cars” Scientific American, March 2005
Back then, SciAm was still mostly written by distinguished scientists — in this case, paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman of the University of Virginia — rather than staff writers.
You will have to pay $7.99 to read the article. However, BBC Science Focus discusses the research it’s based on, plus follow-up research:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/is-global-warming-preventing-the-next-ice-age/
I also found an interesting discussion at Quora.com.
Note the reference to a ’guffin in Flynn’s 2012 blog entry on Fallen Angels, that you quote above. That’s short for MacGuffin, Alfred Hitchcock‘s term for a plot device not to be taken too seriously. Science fiction is not limited to the probable, or even the plausible.
The elided part of the quote helps clarify what Flynn means: “Now this is a common enough literary trope — reversal of expectations — but the matter was already becoming politicized and so reaction to the book was largely political, even though a closer inspection of the premise reveals that it accepts the fact that carbon dioxide does tend to warm the earth.”
The backstory to PESHAWAR LANCERS by Stirling is that a comet somehow turned Europe into frozen slush, and thus the British Empire packed up and moved to India. (it does have nice things to say about Disraeli, which had me at hello, given that I was the first person at Oregon State University to plow through all six volumes of the Moneypenny and Buckle biography–had to cut pages on the last two books).
@92 — And the new Ice Age caused a cannibalistic death cult to take hold of Russia. Great fun; of course, there are zeppelins! I’ll have to read it again.
Jasper Fforde’s “Early Riser” imagines humanity as a species that hibernates. It is a treat from start to finish; great characters and world building. The story is engaging, the writing terrific. Fforde is witty and funny even when describing the cannibal zombie byproducts of big pharma profit conspiracies. ANd it’s a stand alone. which is a big plus in my book.